Global Family Doctor

WONCA is an unusual, yet convenient acronym comprising the first five initials of the World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians.

Professor Barbara Starfield championed the value and need of strong primary health care systems worldwide. This collection emphasizes the case for primary care and includes a number of Barbara Starfield's own articles as well as other key related material.

577 Individual behavioural counselling helps people to quit smoking

April 24, 2018

written by Brian McAvoy
Clinical question

Compared with no treatment or brief advice, how effective is individual behavioural counselling in promoting smoking cessation?
Bottom line

There was high-quality evidence that individually delivered smoking cessation counselling assisted smokers to quit. Individual counselling increased the chances of quitting by between 40% and 80%, compared with minimal support. There was moderate-quality evidence of a smaller relative benefit when counselling was used in addition to pharma­cotherapy, compared with people using pharmacotherapy alone. There is a suggestion intensive counselling may be better, when compared with a brief counselling interven­tion. The few studies that compared different types of counselling did not show any differences between them.
Caveat

Almost half of the trials recruited people in hospital set­tings, but there was no evidence of heterogeneity of results in different settings. There was a range of smoking cessation counsellors, including health educators and psychologists.
Context

Individual counselling is commonly used to help people who are trying to quit smoking. The review looked at trials of counselling by a trained therapist providing one or more face-to-face sessions, separate from medical care. The outcome was being a non-smoker at least 6 months later.
Cochrane Systematic Review